Solide Mirage Typeface

In the begining, Frànçois asked Jérémy Landes to design a logo for his band. This band, Frànçois And The Atlas Montains, needed a sign to be used in replacement of their long nametag. Bodoni faces appeared to be an obvious inspiration as it was used in several versions on all the band's medias. As the fonts always were set in caps, Jérémy decided to draw an unicase, allowing the band to mix different shape families by stirring lowercases and uppercases together. If the caps remains quite classical, the lowercases show a stronger temperament. All the lowercases that should have ascenders or descenders, as the b, d, p or q are the most suprising, with there compressed shapes and long serifs. Solide Mirage began as a squared monospaced typeface, for practical layout reasons, quickly followed by a proportional companion, a more narrow design to allow subtler text layouts. Both typefaces have ornemental alternates A, O and V inheriting the zig-zag spirit of the album cover created by the visual artist Tatiana Defraine. A small set of ornaments have been drawn too, widely used in the album leaflet.

During the creation process, after a lot of talks, both Frànçois and Jérémy decided that the Solide Mirage fonts would be free and open-source. This decision was meant to allow the typeface to have its own life while the band fans would be able to seize the sensible world conveyed by the album and the fonts altogether. This is quite unique for the music industry / typographic scene to do such thing together.